


Brown

by Fallynleaf



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-14
Updated: 2013-11-14
Packaged: 2018-01-01 11:10:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,094
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1044134
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fallynleaf/pseuds/Fallynleaf
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Colors are brighter in the future, Steve thinks.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Brown

**Author's Note:**

> My friend Jessica and I both came out of the Captain America film thinking: " _that was a very brown movie_."

Colors are brighter in the future, Steve thinks. Everything in the 40s had been browns. Some dull, like the rain-soaked cobblestone of the inner city, some rich and earthy, like the gardens which sprang up, squeezed into unexpected places, where hope emerged into the clouded light to feed a hungry people. War had been the brown of dust and caked on sweat, a nameless uniform before it bore the bright-but-soon-wilting touch of red. Even blood fades to brown eventually.

Neon red fringes an “open” sign to Steve’s right as he passes.  Another glance, and he takes in the vibrantly dressed women outfitting a strip club, their makeup too luminescent and alien in the lit-up night to be properly alluring. Steve shivers, and quickens his pace. There are too many sights, too many colors for a midnight stroll that was supposed to be calming.

A man huddles in a corner, draped in a mottled brown blanket. He gazes up at Steve, his unwashed face illuminated far too clearly in the streetlamps, yellow, and in the multi-colored light from a thousand billboards which nobody and everybody reads. Guiltily, Steve rushes on. He’d give the man some coin, but then he’d be stopping every ten feet, where another broken and over-burdened body sits, awaiting the morning, and with it, the future.

Some things never change. Books haven’t, for one thing. Steve spends a lot of his time reading. In the public library, of course. Stark offered to buy him his own private library’s worth, with any and all of the world’s rarest and latest literature, but Steve declined. Books might not have changed, but people have, and public libraries contain some of both.

Steve wished libraries stayed open past midnight.

He turns around and walks back a block in the direction he’d come.

“Hello, sir,” Steve greets the homeless man. “Do you mind if I sit here awhile?”

“No,” the man replies, his voice betraying a smoking habit, “Whatever you want. Whatever you want.” He carries the odor of the streets, all stale and rancidly sweet. Steve takes a deep breath of it, of all of the refuse of the twenty-first century.

“Have you been in the city long?” Steve asks.

“Yeah, I guess. I’ve been everywhere too long.” He grins, leaning over to scratch at his back, revealing a strip of skin well-decorated with the work of tattoo artists, the black lines turned brown and distorted with age. This man wore his heart turned out on his skin. Steve looks at the depictions of thorned roses and skulls, of dragon teeth and coiled snakes, and wonders at why the world doesn’t want this man.

“You’ve got – you’ve got quite the collection of artwork there,” Steve says.

“Yeah. Would you believe it, my sister designs tats for a career.”

“Oh.”

“So I got her to design me a real map of my life. Started with the rose” – he lifts his shirt off entirely, and Steve can’t help but gasp at the landscape of skin before him – “and then got a dragon carved into me.” He continues to list the order of them all until he’d stripped away his pants, too, and shivered almost naked in the crisp night.

“Where do you want to go next with your life?” Steve asks, trying to ignore the network of scar tissue which crisscrossed the tattoo lines.

“I dunno.” The man shrugs. “Maybe go to Tennessee. I always wanted to go to Tennessee. My sister said there’s a great museum there, but it might have gotten torn down for housing developments. They’re always tearing stuff down for housing developments. But she was always the real worldly one of us, the one who always cared about the deeper stuff. She’s the artist.”

Steve says nothing for a couple moments, just drinking in the night and this man’s stale dreams. Slowly, he reaches into his pocket. He grabs the slim brown booklet, which Stark had given him, and a black pen. He scrawls a couple things into the booklet, then tears the paper free and hands it to the man.

A check, written to the tune of every single penny Stark had deposited into his fund for a private library. _To buy dreams_ , Steve wrote.

The man says nothing at first. No simple word of thanks could be enough. He looks at the check, then at Steve, and he begins to sob.

Steve waits, watching city life go on around them as usual while this one man’s world spins in dazzling new technicolor shades of promise. Tears roll down the man’s cheeks, catching the blinking red and blue lights of a nearby flashing sign. Somewhere nearby, a group of men emerge from the strip club, pulling up the brown colors of their jackets to protect against the cold, while Steve stands next to a weeping man clothed only in his underwear.

“What’s your name, sir?” the man asks.

“Steve. What’s yours?”

“John.”

* * *

 

Some changes are good, Steve thinks, as he looks up museums in Tennessee on the internet. There was no Google then, no bright letters in primary colors to herald the discovery of a thousand possible things, some new, some old.

His eyes catch the soft leather cover of the book beside him. He picks it up, gently, and lifts the cover to stare for awhile until his eyes glaze over with the past and he forgets, just for the moment. To this day, months, eternities later, he still doesn’t know who’d cobbled it together for him. He suspects it was Coulson, but nobody offers to confirm or deny this.

The photograph is in sepia tone, the image rough and blurred with age. Peggy looks younger than Steve remembered. But maybe that’s because she _was_ younger then, when Steve had just been a skinny, scraggly boy and the war had been real-but-not.

Steve turns the page. More photographs, all brown, and brown, and young.

He thinks of the flashing lights, of the pretty girls dressed like aliens, alarming and fierce and a thousand shades too bright. His finger brushes a coalition of pretty girls all striped and starred with the vibrant browns of freedom.

What had been the exact shade of Peggy’s eyes?

He flips through the photo book, his fingers flying fast through smiles and uniforms, through one dimensional snapshots of dead people, through a worn world all awash in sepia.

The future remembers the past in shades of brown.

Steve wonders when he will forget how to see his own memories in color. He wonders if it hadn’t already happened.


End file.
